The Great Sabbath

“Since on the seventh day God was finished

with the work he had been doing,

he rested on the seventh day from all the work he had undertaken.” (Gn 2:2)

Nothing happens today. Jesus does no work. Instead, following the commandment of the Torah, he rests.

There are certainly periods in our lives where God does not seem to be doing anything. God seems to be absent, to have forgotten about us, to be snoozing. Holy Saturday helps us to see that these experiences are not to be rushed through on the way to a quick Easter. These moments have their own value.

The disciples rest as well, but in a different way. Given the whirlwind of events starting with Palm Sunday and concluding with Jesus’ burial, the extremes of exultation and desolation, the disciples must have been absolutely exhausted. I imagine that when they awoke Saturday morning, the immensity of a future without Jesus greeted them. We should not be too quick to move past this grief as we try to heal from the “Good Friday” experiences in our lives – and we must accept that many of them will not lead to any Easter we will ever see in this life.

For the disciples, perhaps this rest also allowed them to begin to come to terms with the blunt fact of their own betrayals of Jesus. The temptation to busy themselves in the routines and business of daily life must have been great, but the Sabbath rest prevented that. There was, in a sense, nothing to distract them from their guilt and shame.

Liturgically, we too rest today. There is no daily Mass today because liturgically Jesus is still in the tomb, and with the disciples in terrified hiding. Whether we experience today as a day of rest from an exhausting week (or year), or as a day to confront some aspect of our lives we would rather ignore, or as a day to mourn the dead ends in our lives, it reminds us not to rush through the messiness on the way to a new life.

Author: Matt Erickson, Theology Department